Stevens
the strong bursts of his heart, and you think back to a story that you're almost certain you remember about a knight who used the heart of a dragon to cure his ailing love. You go to bed, and when you wake sometime after midnight, he is gone, no smoke or smell or scuffs on the windowsill, as if he evaporated rather than fled. Outside the world seems like an illusion, not a place you're in so much as a scene flowing past you, a movement that is some comfort in its best moments, the city so warm that it creates the sensation of touch even when no one else is near. But then the opposite is true as well, something about loneliness in a crowd. And all you remember are Skip's wings like blankets as you close the window, lock it, then stop by the bathroom on your way to bed to collect a Percocet, for which there is no metaphor. THERE SHOULD BE a moral to these men, this dragon. But finally your life
is no tragedy: no one dying of AIDS or cancer, no coma, no street crime. Just a voice in your head asking why you should be so sad. Too young for nostalgia, you still wonder what happened to love, if it's somehow your fault. The pictures pan across your computer screen, a gallery of unspoken stories that persist even when the machine is off. It makes you wonder how much unhappiness, however slight from each person, can parcel together into a catastrophe. Or at least an epidemic-a novel where every character is achingly normal, where the final page is less an ending than a cessation of ink. Only then, because you want to feel special, do you consider the possibility that Skip might return one day. You will round a corner to find him waiting, and he will raise his wings slightly in what might be the start of an embrace or else the start of a question that he would ask you if he could. Of course, you're not sure what that question would be, but you imagine answering it anyway-the right answer at last, whatever that is, like a dark jewel you can hold. In your mind you will always see it this way, your voice a momentarily palpable thing before it dissipates into the city around you, and the sound of everything else returns. lÂŁil
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FUGUE#Z9